When I started looking at this, I assumed SQL Clone would work. After all, the product tries to ensure that a clone looks just like any other database to SQL Server. It does, and TDE just works.

I’m still looking at other features, but so far, everything works great. The clone databases are indistinguishable from normal databases, except that I can blow one away and recreate it from the image in seconds. That’s pretty cool, especially when you’ve messed up a bunch of data while writing code that wasn’t quite production ready.

I’m looking forward to seeing how others use SQL Clone and how this will help ensure developers work with larger, known data sets, in their own sandboxes. Perhaps we’ll finally get rid of the shared database and developers’ work unnecessarily impacting their teammates.